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Comment by wcummings | Hacker News Reader

Is this a joke?

No, I get this request quite a bit from people that sincerely miss web rings. I'm not sure how much of it is anachronistic nostalgia and how much of it is a true desire to bring it back. To give an example of this, I've gotten more than a few requests to add the Gopher protocol to Neocities.

But aren't web rings just composed of vanilla hyperlinks? Why does that need to be added as a feature? What's stopping people from making them now?

IIRC the old webrings had a CGI backend that would collect the addresses and then you would click "next" and it would take you to the next site. But yeah you could just make a vanilla one. You could also just make one outside of the context of Neocities.

But if the next site went down or didn't link to the next site correctly, you couldn't proceed. That was always my problem with webrings. They depended on each site to embed the ring code properly, and usually they didn't, so you were stuck trying to find a working one. It was a pretty lousy UX overall.

That's interesting the ones I remember were literally rings of static links, coordinated by the webmasters, presumably over email. I see what you mean now.

those were not webrings. those were "just" link exchanges.

It may have been lousy UX, but I suppose it also provided a social convention of not breaking the chain. Weakest links and all that. Relevant to the OP about linkrot!

Maybe a modern equivalent would redirect downed sites to the IPFS archive.

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